MEDIA PITCHTara and Claire

SynopsisThe clip will start out with Lola (the protagonist) getting ready for school. She’ll be an

archetypal teenager and we’ll get an introduction to her as a character and her personality- through the connotations of her room and her costume. We’ll then see Katie getting ready,

frantically. We’ll get an insight into her problems which include organising her younger brother and battling with her girlfriend. Next, her younger brother Jack will be introduced as ‘the funny one’ he’ll be charismatic and chilled out: un-phased by his sister’s dramatic morning routine.

He’ll be the archetypal ‘lad’. After that, Susan (‘the geeky one’) is introduced and is the stereotypical sensible and mild teen that is fully invested in her work. Although, she loves playing sport and is a keen footballer and basketballer- she often competes against all the

boys. Susan’s in a relationship with Katie and they’re always arguing. The last character we meet is Ethan: he’s always in trouble with the police and in school too- his hearts in the right place though. This character has struggles with his dad letting him be a teenager so relies on his friends’ support. Moreover, the sequence progresses to the park where all the friends are together- allowing us to see the importance of friendship. Finally, there’s a blur between the positive friendship scenes and the melancholy dark room: where the friends are being held

hostage- shown as a montage throughout.

Explain how effective our opening will be in communicating genre

Explain how effective our opening will be in creating enigma

Explain how effective our opening is in introducing key characters

Explain how our opening will be effective in setting up the plot

The plot will form, when the montage of thriller shots are shown, as the audience will get a sense of the turmoil that is foreshadowed in the opening. Shots of characters tied up will quickly cut onto the screen,

hopefully making the audience feel slightly disorientated, so that they can get inside the minds of the characters, realising that everything is not as it

seems. When the characters are introduced, we find out who the protagonist is and who are the main characters are, which shows the type

of plotlines that might occur between them.

The mood of our opening will fluctuate according to when the thriller scenes are shown and when the opening finishes, leaving the audience gripped, wanting to

watch till the end of the film. The diegetic soundtrack at the start of the opening will reflect a cheery mood, relating to a typical teen ‘coming of age’ movie. This music will coincide with the bubbly body movement from the characters that we see. Our

inspiration for this idea came from our research of the movies, ‘Perks of Being a Wallflower’ and ‘juno’, as they both use an indie diegetic soundtrack to sustain the

opening as the opening titles are being shown. This creates a mellow mood, so not to shock the audience straight away, reflecting the features of a teen drama and not a thriller. This could also be effective in our opening, as we can use the soundtrack at the beginning to set a happy mood, which we will then distort, by adding the cuts to

the thriller scenes. The mood in our opening, will work really well with the character’s facial expressions, as when their expressions change, the audience will know that

they aren’t as happy as before, thus foreshadowing the fluctuations in mood throughout the film.

Explain how our opening will be effective in creating the right mood and tone

Explain how our opening will be effective in setting up the pace and rhythm

The pace will start slow, due to the fact that we will have no diegetic soundtrack over the opening. The soundtrack will start when Niamh’s character ‘Lola’ puts on her headphones, which will look as though the

audience can hear everything that she can hear as well, making it soundtrack diegetic. This is effective as it adds a sustained pace to the

opening and makes the audience think that there will no more changes in the soundtrack pace or pace of the character.

The pace will be changed when the thriller shots are shown. This will bring the audience’s attention away from the characters happiness and into

their dark reality. Since this happens in the blink of an eye, the audience won’t know what to expect, distorting the pace.

How conventional is our opening?

How well will you appeal to your target audience?Through our various characters, dialogue context and setting, our opening should

reflect our chosen genre quite well, since our distributor is Nickelodeon (an American Television and film institution), who’s demographic is children to adolescents, ages 8-

17. This shows that we want to reach a large teen audience, but also entice the slightly older teens as well.

Our drama is a hybrid, which links, both the teen genre and the thriller genre together, adding that little bit of maturity to the content we are aiming to show. In our opening, there will be quick cuts to scenes of the thriller genre and likewise teen drama, giving both our older and our younger teen audiences, a taste of content that they will enjoy.

Through our research on our target demographic, our questionnaire results and our focus groups, we have found that many teens enjoy spending time with their friends

and using various types of modern technology. We will appeal to our target audience by incorporating different types of technology into our opening, whether we film using a

mobile phone etc. and relay the strong theme of friendship throughout.

Character representations

Katie

◦ Loves to use technology◦ Enjoys hanging out with her friends◦ Watches teen tv dramas, like ‘Friends’ and ‘Vampire Diaries’◦ Social Media is her life◦ She cares a lot about her appearance and spends time putting make-

up on every day◦ Casting Jess:◦ Jess suits this character very well, as Jess also enjoys going on social

media and her phone, checking messages and arranging times to meet up with people. Jess watches the same sort of shows that Katie watches, typical to the teen girl convention and she is very talented at applying make-up every morning for school.

◦ Jess enjoys meeting up with her friends, whenever she has the chance and this will be reflected through the friendship scenes in our opening, letting the audience into Katie’s world, but also the world of Jess, as she is friends with the other actors.

Jack

◦ Loves technology◦ Enjoys hanging out with his friends◦ He plays sport whenever he can◦ Unless he is out with his friends, he is inside his room, playing video

games on his Xbox◦ Casting Harry:◦ Harry is a mirror image of Jack, because of his joker like qualities,

making everyone laugh. Like Jess, Harry is a fan of social media and video games. Jack likes to hang out with Katie’s friends at the park and we will show this in our opening.

Character representations

Character representations

Lola

Character representationsKyle

We’ve decided to use Jake as Kyle, because he is a boy who likes sport, hanging out with his friends and is

close to Susie in real life, which helps with their chemistry in the opening. We’d associate Jakes style with Kyle, as it is casual, but stylish, reflecting the archetypal teen boy quite well.

Character representationsSusan

We’ve chosen Susie as our Susan, as she enjoys sport, hangs out with Jake

and Jess a lot and works hard at school, reflecting the inner ‘geek’, that we wanted Susan to possess.

Susie’s everyday costume would be conventional of what we’d have Susan wear, making her a good

choice for our casting.

Liv Josh

Liv and Josh are typical archetypal teenagers, which helps the relatability of the genre. They both love to hang out with Ethan and Susan in the park.

Locations for Filming

Script

Storyboard